Lighting his briar pipe, Evan called himself “the local Pelagian” and explained his very un-Calvinist view that God cannot predestine our future because the future does not exist; it is only an abstract concept, shaped by our free will.

Mr Novak’s critics regarded him as “the prince of darkness,” a nickname he liked so much that he used it as the title of his autobiography.

In the nineteenth century, American medicine saw pitched battles between orthodox physicians and a host of charismatic figures with curious new theories like Thomsonianism, which posited that most illness was due to an excess of cold in the body, or the orificial surgery of Edwin Hartley Pratt, whose fundamental insight was that, as one detractor put it, with only modest exaggeration, “the rectum is the focus of existence, contains the essence of life, and performs the functions ordinarily ascribed to the heart and brain.”

Before long the world will be cloven with a war between the telescopists and the microscopists.

Not only is their life on other planets, and Earthlike life, and mammalian life, but the females look exactly as voluptuously mammalian as our most beautiful actresses and models, if not more so. Calling these beautiful women unintelligent is very rude!

In the popular mind, scientists generate facts and chisel them into granite tablets.

Most people never attempt to be as precise as Brian, preferring to stick with what they know, which is the two- or three-setting mental model.

He lives in Hoboken, New Jersey, with his wife, Evelyn, and a wide range of tame and semi-tame creatures – none of them from Final Fantasy III.

The writer Warwick Cairns calculated that if you wanted your child to be kidnapped and held overnight by a stranger, you would have to leave the child outside and unattended for 750,000 years.

And so of all sides they went to recommend themselves to the elder brother of death.